Fifteen years ago, my wife kissed our newborn son on the forehead, grabbed her purse, and told me she was stepping out to buy diapers. It was a quiet Sunday afternoon, the kind where the sunlight streamed softly through the living room windows and life felt, at least on the surface, ordinary and safe. She said she’d be back in less than an hour, her smile warm, reassuring. I didn’t know that those words would become the last ordinary ones I would hear from her for over a decade.
She never came home.